Monday, November 03, 2008

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 9)

Firstly, Sanning states (p. 103) that a Canadian-Jewish journalist by the name of Arthur Raymond Davies, attended a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee meeting in the fall of 1944, during which the secretary, Schachne Epstein, "reported the evacuation of 3.5 million Jews from the territories occupied by Germany".

RODOH poster Warheitseeker has kindly located the original passage in Davies' book and posted it here. This is what Davies actually wrote:

He thanked the Jews of the world for their aid to the Soviet people. He greeted the Jews of Poland. He revealed that the Germans had killed about five million Jews and that the Soviet Union had succeeded in saving three-and-a-half million.

So what does Sanning add and omit? Firstly, Epstein does not mention evacuation; Sanning infers it without telling his readers that he is drawing an inference rather than reporting direct speech. This in itself is dishonest. Secondly, Epstein does not specify that the 'saved' Jews had ever lived in territories occupied by Germany. Epstein may simply mean that, by blocking the German advance, the USSR had saved Jews in unoccupied areas of both the USSR and the rest of the world.

Thirdly, Sanning omits the most obvious rebuttal of his interpretation: the mention of five million Jewish murder victims. Clearly, many of these victims must have been living in areas that Sanning claims were evacuated. Moreover, Sanning's entire thesis is a denial of these five million deaths, therefore it is blatantly dishonest to use a source that actually refers to them in the same sentence as the "3.5 million" saved Jews that Sanning quote-mines.

Sanning's second distortion occurs on p.112, where he queries the sex ratios of Soviet Jews:

On the basis of the age distribution of the Jews in the RSFSR 705,290 Jews of the recorded 2,267,814 Jews in the Soviet Union (1959) belonged to the age group "0-28 years" which at the end of WWII hadn't either been born yet or was too young for military service; its sex structure should have been more or less balanced. The male/female composition among those 29 years and older thus was 677,984 and 884,540, respectively. [...]

Sanning has therefore, outrageously, taken the age profile for a Soviet Republic, the RSFSR, which suffered proportionally far fewer Holocaust deaths than the western republics, and used it for a projection on to the entire Soviet population, which he has then used as 'evidence' that a Holocaust did not occur in the western USSR! This alone disqualifies him as an honest demographer.